K Part 69

"Do you want me to marry him, K.?"

K. looked straight ahead.

"I want you to be happy, dear."

They were on the terrace of the White Springs Hotel again. K. had ordered dinner, making a great to-do about getting the dishes they both liked. But now that it was there, they were not eating. K. had placed his chair so that his profile was turned toward her. He had worn the duster religiously until nightfall, and then had discarded it. It hung limp and dejected on the back of his chair. Past K.'s profile Sidney could see the magnolia tree shaped like a heart.

"It seems to me," said Sidney suddenly, "that you are kind to every one but me, K."

He fairly stammered his astonishment:--

"Why, what on earth have I done?"

"You are trying to make me marry Max, aren't you?"

She was very properly ashamed of that, and, when he failed of reply out of sheer inability to think of one that would not say too much, she went hastily to something else:

"It is hard for me to realize that you--that you lived a life of your own, a busy life, doing useful things, before you came to us. I wish you would tell me something about yourself. If we're to be friends when you go away,"--she had to stop there, for the lump in her throat--"I'll want to know how to think of you,--who your friends are,--all that."

He made an effort. He was thinking, of course, that he would be visualizing her, in the hospital, in the little house on its side street, as she looked just then, her eyes like stars, her lips just parted, her hands folded before her on the table.

"I shall be working," he said at last. "So will you."

"Does that mean you won't have time to think of me?"

"I'm afraid I'm stupider than usual to-night. You can think of me as never forgetting you or the Street, working or playing."

Playing! Of course he would not work all the time. And he was going back to his old friends, to people who had always known him, to girls--

He did his best then. He told her of the old family house, built by one of his forebears who had been a king's man until Washington had put the case for the colonies, and who had given himself and his oldest son then to the cause that he made his own. He told of old servants who had wept when he decided to close the house and go away. When she fell silent, he thought he was interesting her. He told her the family traditions that had been the fairy tales of his childhood. He described the library, the choice room of the house, full of family paintings in old gilt frames, and of his father's collection of books. Because it was home, he waxed warm over it at last, although it had rather hurt him at first to remember. It brought back the other things that he wanted to forget.

But a terrible thing was happening to Sidney. Side by side with the wonders he described so casually, she was placing the little house. What an exile it must have been for him! How hopelessly middle-cla.s.s they must have seemed! How idiotic of her to think, for one moment, that she could ever belong in this new-old life of his!

What traditions had she? None, of course, save to be honest and good and to do her best for the people around her. Her mother's people, the Kennedys went back a long way, but they had always been poor. A library full of paintings and books! She remembered the lamp with the blue-silk shade, the figure of Eve that used to stand behind the minister's portrait, and the cherry bookcase with the Encyclopaedia in it and "Beacon Lights of History." When K., trying his best to interest her and to conceal his own heaviness of spirit, told her of his grandfather's old carriage, she sat back in the shadow.

"Fearful old thing," said K.,--"regular cabriolet. I can remember yet the family rows over it. But the old gentleman liked it--used to have it repainted every year. Strangers in the city used to turn around and stare at it--thought it was advertising something!"

"When I was a child," said Sidney quietly, "and a carriage drove up and stopped on the Street, I always knew some one had died!"

There was a strained note in her voice. K., whose ear was attuned to every note in her voice, looked at her quickly. "My great-grandfather,"

said Sidney in the same tone, "sold chickens at market. He didn't do it himself; but the fact's there, isn't it?"

K. was puzzled.

"What about it?" he said.

But Sidney's agile mind had already traveled on. This K. she had never known, who had lived in a wonderful house, and all the rest of it--he must have known numbers of lovely women, his own sort of women, who had traveled and knew all kinds of things: girls like the daughters of the Executive Committee who came in from their country places in summer with great armfuls of flowers, and hurried off, after consulting their jeweled watches, to luncheon or tea or tennis.

"Go on," said Sidney dully. "Tell me about the women you have known, your friends, the ones you liked and the ones who liked you."

K. was rather apologetic.

"I've always been so busy," he confessed. "I know a lot, but I don't think they would interest you. They don't do anything, you know--they travel around and have a good time. They're rather nice to look at, some of them. But when you've said that you've said it all."

Nice to look at! Of course they would be, with nothing else to think of in all the world but of how they looked.

Suddenly Sidney felt very tired. She wanted to go back to the hospital, and turn the key in the door of her little room, and lie with her face down on the bed.

"Would you mind very much if I asked you to take me back?"

He did mind. He had a depressed feeling that the evening had failed.

And his depression grew as he brought the car around. He understood, he thought. She was grieving about Max. After all, a girl couldn't care as she had for a year and a half, and then give a man up because of another woman, without a wrench.

"Do you really want to go home, Sidney, or were you tired of sitting there? In that case, we could drive around for an hour or two. I'll not talk if you'd like to be quiet." Being with K. had become an agony, now that she realized how wrong Christine had been, and that their worlds, hers and K.'s, had only touched for a time. Soon they would be separated by as wide a gulf as that which lay between the cherry bookcase--for instance,--and a book-lined library hung with family portraits. But she was not disposed to skimp as to agony. She would go through with it, every word a stab, if only she might sit beside K. a little longer, might feel the touch of his old gray coat against her arm. "I'd like to ride, if you don't mind."

K. turned the automobile toward the country roads. He was remembering acutely that other ride after Joe in his small car, the trouble he had had to get a machine, the fear of he knew not what ahead, and his arrival at last at the road-house, to find Max lying at the head of the stairs and Carlotta on her knees beside him.

"K." "Yes?"

"Was there anybody you cared about,--any girl,--when you left home?"

"I was not in love with anyone, if that's what you mean."

"You knew Max before, didn't you?"

"Yes. You know that."

"If you knew things about him that I should have known, why didn't you tell me?"

"I couldn't do that, could I? Anyhow--"

"Yes?"

"I thought everything would be all right. It seemed to me that the mere fact of your caring for him--" That was shaky ground; he got off it quickly. "Schwitter has closed up. Do you want to stop there?"

"Not to-night, please."

They were near the white house now. Schwitter's had closed up, indeed.

The sign over the entrance was gone. The lanterns had been taken down, and in the dusk they could see Tillie rocking her baby on the porch. As if to cover the last traces of his late infamy, Schwitter himself was watering the worn places on the lawn with the garden can.

The car went by. Above the low hum of the engine they could hear Tillie's voice, flat and unmusical, but filled with the harmonies of love as she sang to the child.

When they had left the house far behind, K. was suddenly aware that Sidney was crying. She sat with her head turned away, using her handkerchief stealthily. He drew the car up beside the road, and in a masterful fashion turned her shoulders about until she faced him.

"Now, tell me about it," he said.

"It's just silliness. I'm--I'm a little bit lonely."

"Lonely!"